This October I let myself drift back to my family roots and took a short trip via Marienbad to Silesia, the homeland of my mother’s side of the family.<\/p>\n\n
It all started when I realized last year that I wanted & needed to travel to my mother’s family’s home country again as an adult. Unlike many people in Germany whose father or mother were displaced, I was able to get to know my mother’s homeland as a child. That had to do with my family’s special situation after the war. As the Upper Silesian industrial area was close to the border with Poland, they could also speak Polish and decided to stay after the war despite the numerous reprisals. My mother, for example, only moved to the West after completing her Polish A-levels. Other relatives did not do this until the early 1970s. My mother also spoke perfect Polish and had numerous personal contacts from her youth. So my parents often traveled to communist Poland through the even more communist GDR, gave my father to deaf-mutes, collected works of art by Polish painters and many other treasures that were not considered valuable by the customs officers, who were trained in the materialism of scarcity that existed in reality. <\/p>\n\n
I was left with the parents of a childhood friend of my mother’s on a small Upper Silesian farm, where they did almost everything themselves. I still remember the butter churn, the pig slaughter, the gigantic cows that I milked by hand, the terrifyingly hysterical turkeys and, last but not least, the incredibly deep ponds behind the house that had been created by collapsed coal mines.<\/p>\n\n
When I told people in Germany about the intention of my trip, they all had the same reaction: everyone had relatives in the former eastern territories, whether East Prussia, Silesia, Sudetenland or other areas. Everyone encouraged me to make the trip, and everyone admitted that they had never been to their family’s homeland. Even if I don’t know all the individual stories: I can understand it very well. The often unspoken trauma of the lost homeland, the many sufferings associated with it; all this never invited us to deal with it again. Instead, the younger generation often gave up trying to learn about the unknown homeland in the East from the older generation. Far too many people have died with everything associated with their youth locked away in their souls, pretending it was all irrevocably over.<\/p>\n\n
The further east I drove, the more I realized how little that was true.<\/p>\n\n
To be continued…..<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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